New race proposal: Cynoceph

[argonaut]

Cynocephs, the jackal-headed guardians of the planes. They have a MP pool 1/6.5 of normal but it regenerates very quickly (about 1/3 max per turn is the target).
Mostly flat aptitudes except:

  Code:

+    APT(SP_CYNOCEPH,        SK_SPELLCASTING,   -2),
+    APT(SP_CYNOCEPH,        SK_CONJURATIONS,    1),
+    APT(SP_CYNOCEPH,        SK_HEXES,           1),
+    APT(SP_CYNOCEPH,        SK_SUMMONINGS,     -3),
+    APT(SP_CYNOCEPH,        SK_TRANSLOCATIONS,  2),
+    APT(SP_CYNOCEPH,        SK_INVOCATIONS,     1),
+    APT(SP_CYNOCEPH,        SK_EVOCATIONS,     -1),

They should make good and different conjurers/enchanters/warpers. As a draw for other play-styles they have the same MR level as Mummies.

The idea is that they'll almost never run out of MP but it will be difficult to get higher level spells on-line. Rings and staffs of power let them cast spells a level or so higher than they normally could so should be especially valuable.

An initial version is here:
https://github.com/aolowin/crawl/tree/cynoceph

A couple of caveats:

• God powers that require MP may need to be scaled
• The MP regeneration rate needs to be tweaked some

[infinitevox]

I like the concept there, my only initial worry is how would this species play out with Guardian Spirit?

[Lasty]

This sounds really frustrating on d:1 -- cast magic dart, walk 3 steps, repeat.

[amaril]

More frustrating than cast 3 magic darts, walk 60 steps, repeat?

[chequers]

Is there any reason for the non-zero apts but lore?

[Shard1697]

Low spellcasting makes sense at least, to make it harder to bolster your MP(which is purposefully low). But the rest of the magic skills ought to be flattened, I see no reason why they should have 2 translocations but -3 summoning. Just give them 1 or 0 in everything.

Also, both invocations and evocations should both be -1 IMO.

[argonaut]

For the aptitudes translocation is for flavour and the summoning malus is to limit spamming allies. Invocations could be lowered to -1.

For guardian spirit I'm not sure it's a big issue since it will be limited to maybe 10 MP in the best case and at that point monsters will be hitting a lot harder than that.

[Shard1697]

For the aptitudes translocation is for flavour

I don't think it's worth it, to be honest. Flat apts give you much more freedom in skilling, at least mentally, even if they're worse overall than what it was before.

[Lasty]

More frustrating than cast 3 magic darts, walk 60 steps, repeat?

IMO yes. 3 magic darts is enough to kill a lot of D:1 stuff relatively often. The base case is "cast 3-7 magic darts depending on role and species, then rest" and "walk a large-ish number of steps then repeat" is the exception case. With this species, the base case is cast 1 dart, walk three tiles, cast 1 dart, walk 3 tiles, repeat forever.

[argonaut]

Actually the way it's currently implemented at level 1 your MP regen rate is just under 1/turn. In testing D1 was a lot faster than usual for a Cj. You get an easy first couple of levels, then it gets harder as L1 spells fall off in power and you don't have enough max MP to cast the higher level spells.